


light

by antenism



Category: Ensemble Stars! (Video Game)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Developing Friendships, Fate & Destiny, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:00:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23647348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antenism/pseuds/antenism
Summary: There are people who want to live forever, and then there is Kohaku, who just wants to live a little longer than this.
Relationships: Oukawa Kohaku/Suou Tsukasa
Comments: 5
Kudos: 25





	light

**Author's Note:**

> they deserve to be happy and fck enstars.

There’s something to be said about balance, Kohaku thinks, about finding it and keeping it. It’s funny how it took growing young to learn how to live again. Wisdom comes with age, as it is usually said. Not so much the reverse, but well. He’s hardly a typical case.

To return to what was before. To have a chance to start over from the very beginning. To remake himself. An impossible wish for most, and yet. It’s something he didn’t think he’d ever have.

  
A second chance.

And then Kohaku met him. He was suddenly the first person, in that way, that he could look at with true interest, wonderment. He’d never, ever experienced anything like it. Not that Suou deserves any sort of qualifier. Tsukasa still retains a sort of naiveté Kohaku doesn’t think he’s ever had. And while he grumbles and complains, it doesn’t take much to see how he enjoys it, once he gets past the veneer of adulthood, free in a way Kohaku can never be. Perhaps there is something to be said about living. About starting anew.

Not so terrible a fate.

For all that Kohaku Oukawa is made from the broken pieces of blood and dust, perhaps that’s how it should be. He’s never felt better, more sure of what he wants. If there’s any good to have come of his life, it is this: the sun filtering down through the trees, the rustle of the wind through the boughs. The sound of wild laughter echoing through the air and the solid earth underneath his feet. 

He lets out a sigh. Though an assassin mind does not preclude such fanciful thoughts, they are ones he can ill-afford. It does not do to linger. There is no returning from such a fate, and to dwell invites nothing but heartbreak. Maybe one day, that will his fate. Black wings still soar, searching, always searching. But they haven’t found him, not just yet. They haven’t found Tsukasa or Crazy:B either. These little lights remain untouched, innocent even after everything they’ve seen and Kohaku wants to protect them at all cost even if he needs to disappear from their lives.

He has been trained to be nothing but a weapon for that kid. However, Tsukasa was different because of how he made him feel. The unknown, identifiability of it all was so chaotic and scary. But there was no other feeling like it. No other person brought that feeling to him. And Kohaku didn’t want anybody else to, for he wanted part of him to belong to Tsukasa, and to Tsukasa only.

It was either a lucky guess, or Tsukasa Suou is truly that naïve. Naïve enough to think that everyone has a chance to be good, that people are born with love in their hearts. Naïve enough to stare down someone born in shrouds of darkness and feel irritation instead of fear.

Naïve enough to see a tool ruined and broken and believe there’s something worth saving left in the shards.

In a way, Kohaku is glad. There’s a certain ugliness to the world that he has experienced and lived. An ugliness that would break Tsukasa’s spirit to hell and back. Kohaku has lived the worst to atone for what he’d done.

Because there’s something in Tsukasa. A light, perhaps, that blinds Kohaku like frost scorched in the rays of morning. It’s not surprising, and maybe it’s a little bit cliché but Kohaku has no other words to describe it in any language.

He was never going to be pure, after all. 

That chance had been stolen from him before his first breath.

Kohaku has never been good at talking about anything. Talking is a dangerous descent into revealing more information than necessary. Talking implies a familiarity no one has ever earned. Words are hard for him to force out from the layers of scar tissue in his lungs, in his heart.

But Tsukasa has always had two different lives, pulling him in two different directions. He is _a/and_ in perfect motion: a Suou and the King of Knights in equal measure, balancing each other out to make a greater whole. Kohaku has only ever been a but, a lesser part of himself and a subtraction from the baseline: he is an idol, but he is also an Oukawa, and the corrosion that his heritage calls his blood flows through him with every instinctive strike at the heart.

His own safety is supplemental. If Tsukasa is safe, then it doesn’t matter what happens to him. But the more time he spends with Tsukasa, the more he realizes: he’s starting to slip up like if Tsukasa got hurt somehow, Kohaku would feel the pain, too, buried so deep in his heart that he wouldn't be able to sew up the seams.

Kohaku has to fight to keep the instinctive shudders of his emotions under control. But he’s never been good at listening to his emotions. They’ve been walled off and chained up for years, locked away before Kohaku even knew the words to describe them.

And somehow, Tsukasa set them free. Like those barriers had never existed at all. Like they were made of mere glass, easy to shatter and crack in spiderweb patterns, but Tsukasa was gentle enough to break through without breaking him.

But Tsukasa lives every day of his life thinking that humanity is better than the sum of its parts. Tsukasa looks at him and sees the good that he insists is there, the good that Kohaku was born without. If there is good blooming in him, it is only because Tsukasa has planted the seeds. Tsukasa Suou, after all, is nothing if not endlessly loving. He is a ray of the sun personified, a progeny of the light, and for Kohaku, who has never been anything but a child of the darkness, it is only natural that he’d find himself drawn to the warmth given by someone with too much love to give.


End file.
